fleet of ships, big ones to ship salmon to San Francisco and smaller ones for shallow waters and for towing larger ships in and out of the Rogue mouth. In 1879 he bought the steamer Varuna and the tug Mary Hume and started a shipyard at Ellensburg. In 1880 he added the steam schooner Mary D. Hume, the tug Pelican in 1883, the schooner Berwick in 1887, the steamer Thistle in 1888, and replacement craft in subsequent years. Returning ships brought goods for Hume's general store. Throughout his career, the store was one of the central components of his business. It was a center of supplies and news for the people of the Rogue, who awaited the arrival of the fall provision ship with anticipation and anxiety, for this vessel was the only source of winter provisions. It provided Hume, the employer of the great majority of the citizens of Gold Beach and Wedderburn, with a means of repossessing the wages of his employees and of profiting on the exchange. Hume became known as the Salmon King of Oregon and referred to himself as a "pygmy monopolist" in an autobiography published in the Radium between 1904 and 1906. Politician According to Hume's biographer, Gordon B. Dodds, Hume "entered politics both as officeholder and as lobbyist to protect his realm from the assaults of anti-monopolists". Between 1890 and 1910 in Oregon, Populist–Progressive coalitions led by W.S. U'Ren and Governor Sylvester Pennoyer, a Democrat, battled business-oriented Republican factions based in Portland. In 1892, John H. Upton, the Populist candidate for the state legislature from Coos and Curry counties campaigned mainly in opposition to Hume's monopoly on the Rogue. Political threats like the one posed by Upton as well as threats from the Alaska Packers' Association (APA), which had begun fishing the Rogue, led Hume to write political editorials, file lawsuits, endorse candidates, petition the legislature, and eventually to run for office himself. In 1894, Hume, hoping for a seat in the state legislature, campaigned in support of Populist demands such as unlimited coinage of silver, more regulation of large corporations (like the APA), and large-scale government spending for internal improvements. Dodds says that this approach "illustrates Hume's view of the purpose of a political campaign: The program advocated should be one that would win, and not necessarily the program that the party or the candidate believed in." After losing this election, Hume